Word: thernstrom
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...this month's Harper's magazine, Winthrop Professor of History Stephan Thernstrom must take the credit for this description of The Crimson. According to Thernstrom, this newspaper has played, and presumably continues to play, a major role in the "leftist" attack on academic freedom on campus. Several years ago, for instance, we allowed accusations of "racial insensitivity" made against Thernstrom to leave the private chambers of the classroom and enter, willy-nilly, into the brash and undisciplined spectacle of public discourse. In doing so, we participated in a "smear campaign" against this poor, defenseless, white male tenured professor that...
Certainly, Thernstrom and his claims do not need yet another media sounding board--he has made his victimization at the hands of undergraduates and The Crimson known to numerous national newspapers and magazines and in best-selling books, such as RTLsh D'Souza's Illiberal Education. Yet it still puzzles me that a tenured professor, particularly at Harvard, would claim that he was the powerless victim in a struggle between a few undergraduates and their teacher...
Given that the struggle was precisely about scholarship and the language of scholarship, it is no wonder that the campus newspaper would seek to discuss the issue and it is no wonder that Thernstrom might feel threatened. Yet in the aftermath of his attacks on The Crimson, the effect of shouting "p.c." has been less speech and not more; it has forced students into silence, and merely amplified the professorial bully pulpit that the professor, by profession, already possessed...
...drawing attention to himself and away from the question of language and its political power in the classroom, Thernstrom used the personal (his person) to cover and efface the political altogether. The issue of "racial insensitivity" became an issue about Thernstrom, and not about the students or the concerns that had been raised by them...
Cole calls Literature and Arts A-50 both "popular" and "politically correct," as if, like Thernstrom, he would like to suggest that the canon, the institution, even the tenured professor, is being threatened by the overwhelming collective power of identity politics. Way back when Cole was an undergraduate at Columbia--in the 1980s--all the kids had to study "mainly the works of dead white males," but nobody seemed to mind, he says. I am not particularly interested here in a debate about the relative merits of Harvard and Columbia's core systems; it seems to me of little difference...